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The Importance of Reading the Bible Throughout my priestly ministry, I have always encouraged people to read the Bible. At a time when God, his revelation, and sacred teachings are distorted and redefined, it is a safe first practice to lead people to the Bible. By reading it, a person encounters a living word. He sees and hears God on his own terms, from his own deeds and words. Although more teaching will be needed, this initial practice of reading the Bible can dispel false images, co …

Everett Ferguson on Early Christian Baptism Everett Ferguson, a Protestant elder, biblical scholar, and Church historian, has written what’s perhaps the definitive work on the subject, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. Ferguson spends hundreds of pages carefully combing through the evidence to expose the first five hundred years’ worth of Christians thought about baptism. His findings are neatly summarized on page 854: …

The Author in his own words:C.S. Lewis’s Trilemma: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis famously poses a trilemma, sometimes called the Liar, Lunatic, or Lord argument, which works like this: Jesus presents himself as the Messiah, as the Son of God, and even as God. Given this, the three ways we can make sense of him are to conclude that he was delusional (believing he was God when he wasn’t), deceptive (knowing he wasn’t God but duping his followers into believing he w …

The Argument for the Great Apostasy If the early Church was the Catholic Church, why can’t we say that Christians just lost their way early on? That’s the argument many Mormon and Protestant theologians make. In Mormon theology, this idea is expressed in terms of a Great Apostasy that followed the death of the apostles: Following the death of Jesus Christ, wicked people persecuted and killed many Church members. Other Church members drifted from the principles taught by Jesus Christ …

The Rise of Gender Fluidity and the Need for Truth At my son’s large public high school it is not uncommon to see kids in various states of  “gender fluidity,” but not simply in the sense of feminine boys and tomboy girls as I saw back in my own public high school in the 1980s. No, these kids are either formally “transitioning” or experimenting with opposite-sex alter-egos, both of which have become trendy and faddish. As parents, we are often lulled by a misguided compassion that ke …